The question every prospective member eventually asks is the one Nigerian healthcare is least practised at answering plainly. What does it cost. The standard private-sector answer is to deflect — "let us assess first, then we can advise" — which is interpreted by the client, correctly, as code for "the price will be whatever the room appears to be able to pay." That posture is one of the reasons affluent Nigerian families have, for thirty years, treated private domestic care as something to be tolerated and foreign care as something to be paid for. Foreign clinics quote.
This piece is a public answer to the public question. It is not a marketing brochure. It is the honest accounting of what a serious concierge practice in Abuja charges in 2026, what is inside the fee, what is not, and what the comparable cost of doing nothing looks like.
Why pricing in Nigerian private healthcare is opaque — and why that is the wrong norm
The reasons for opacity are partly cultural and partly structural. Culturally, money is not discussed openly in Nigerian medical settings; price is felt to cheapen the relationship. Structurally, most Nigerian private practices have priced by negotiation because their cost base has been volatile, their client mix has ranged from cash-poor to cash-vast, and their insurance ecosystem has been thin enough to make published rates feel naive.
Those reasons have been overtaken by the present. Concierge medicine is a recurring service, not an episodic treatment. A recurring service that the client cannot price in advance is a service the client cannot evaluate, compare, or budget around. Opacity in this context is not discretion. It is friction that suppresses adoption among exactly the people the model is built for — senior Nigerian families who plan their finances with the seriousness of any other commercial decision.
So the working principle here, which we apply at Kinedic and which we think the rest of the sector will be forced to adopt, is that the membership fee and what it covers should be on the table before the second meeting. The first meeting decides whether the relationship is right. The second one decides whether the structure is acceptable. Money belongs at the second meeting, not at the end of year one.
The shape of the pricing — and what each tier covers
A serious Nigerian concierge practice operates in three tiers, broadly corresponding to the three relationships described in the case piece. The numbers below are honest 2026 ranges for an Abuja practice with the operational infrastructure to deliver the service properly — meaning a small panel, hospital anchoring, after-hours coverage, and a working records system. They are quoted in annual naira and US dollar equivalents at NGN 1,500 to the dollar.
Personal and family care. The base tier for an individual adult sits in the range of NGN 4.5 million to NGN 7.5 million per year — roughly USD 3,000 to USD 5,000. Family rates for a spouse and dependents typically add 50 to 70 percent of the base fee per additional adult and a smaller increment per child. What the fee covers: a named family physician, same-day access during business hours, an after-hours line that is answered by a clinician, an annual comprehensive physical with appropriate imaging and laboratory work, ongoing management of any chronic conditions, vaccinations, screenings, travel medicine, and direct coordination of any specialist referrals or hospital admissions within Abuja. What the fee does not cover, in any honest practice: the cost of the hospital admission itself, the cost of specialist procedures, the cost of medications beyond a starter supply, and the cost of any care delivered outside Nigeria.
Executive care for principals. The principal tier sits in the range of NGN 12 million to NGN 25 million per year — roughly USD 8,000 to USD 17,000 — and the wider band reflects the genuine variation in what principals actually need. The defining additions over the base tier are operational rather than clinical. Documented confidentiality protocols. In-residence visits when the client cannot move publicly. A dedicated case manager who carries the file when the principal cannot personally hold it. International second-opinion access through credentialed partner clinics when domestic capacity is insufficient. Coordination with the principal's security and travel detail where relevant. The medicine is mostly standard senior primary care plus age-appropriate screening; the fee is paying for the operational envelope around it.
Diaspora care for an elderly parent at home. The diaspora tier sits in the range of NGN 6 million to NGN 10 million per year — roughly USD 4,000 to USD 7,000 — depending on the complexity of the parent's existing conditions and the intensity of the reporting required. What it covers: monthly home visits to the parent, monthly written and video reports to the named diaspora contact, medication management with refills coordinated locally, after-hours liaison through the same clinical line, hospital admission coordination through the named hospital, and a clear escalation path that does not depend on the diaspora child being awake. What it does not cover: the cost of the parent's medications, the cost of any inpatient stay, and the cost of evacuating the parent abroad in the rare scenario that becomes necessary.
These ranges are not edge cases. They are the honest middle of what any serious Abuja concierge practice should be charging in 2026 if it is actually doing the work. Quoted numbers significantly below these ranges should be interrogated for what has been cut — usually it is panel size discipline, after-hours coverage, or the reporting infrastructure. Quoted numbers significantly above should be interrogated for what is being bundled — usually it is a hospital relationship that the client could access independently for less.
What the fee explicitly does not buy
A fair pricing conversation is shorter on what is included than on what is excluded. The exclusions are where most disputes happen later.
The fee does not buy hospital costs. If the member is admitted, the hospital bill is separate. The concierge practice can negotiate it, coordinate it, and reduce it, but it does not absorb it. Any practice that implies otherwise is either underwriting hospital admissions at a loss or quietly raising the membership fee to cover them — in which case low-utilisation members are subsidising high-utilisation ones, which is health insurance under a different name and should be priced as such.
The fee does not buy procedures. Surgery, complex imaging beyond the annual scope, oncology workups, cardiology interventions — these are referred out, coordinated by the practice, and billed separately. The advantage of being a member is that these are routed to the right facility quickly and at negotiated rates, not that they are free.
The fee does not buy medications beyond the immediate dispensing window. A member with hypertension does not have their entire year of antihypertensives prepaid through the membership. They are prescribed, sourced through trusted pharmacies, and the cost is theirs.
The fee does not buy foreign care. Concierge medicine in Nigeria changes the role of foreign care from primary safety net to occasional escalation. When that escalation is needed — for a second opinion, for an intervention that is not yet available domestically at the right standard — the practice coordinates the introduction and the records transfer. The clinic abroad bills the patient directly.
The fee does not buy a guarantee on outcomes. No physician anywhere can offer that. What it does buy is a measurable reduction in the conditions that drive bad outcomes — late diagnosis, fragmented records, missed follow-up, delayed escalation. That is the honest claim.
How the fee compares to what affluent Nigerian families already spend
The instinct on first reading is that the fee is large. The accurate read is that the fee is mostly a redistribution of money that affluent Nigerian families are already spending, in less productive ways, on the same underlying problem.
Consider a typical Nigerian senior household in Abuja that runs on the default operating model. An annual physical at a London or Dubai clinic costs USD 4,000 to USD 8,000 by the time travel, accommodation, and the physical itself are accounted for honestly — and it is one moment of certainty separated from the next by twelve months of medical drift. An unplanned admission at a private hospital in Abuja, paid retail, lands somewhere between NGN 2 million and NGN 8 million for a serious cardiac or surgical event, with no guarantee of continuity in the discharge plan. A serious medical evacuation to Dubai or Johannesburg is a USD 25,000 to USD 60,000 event before any treatment is included.
The relevant comparison is not concierge fees against zero. It is concierge fees against the present cost base of medical episodes that the household already absorbs, plus the foregone value of conditions that would have been caught earlier in a continuous-care model. Read against that comparison, concierge medicine for a typical Nigerian senior household is roughly cost-neutral in the first year, mildly cost-positive in the second, and cost-negative from the third year forward — which is the point at which the model starts paying back the cost of the membership through the trips not taken, the admissions not needed, and the conditions managed before they become crises.
That is the financial argument. The clinical argument, which is the more important one, is that the same configuration is better medicine.
Why we cap the panel — and why caps matter for the fee
A concierge fee has to be honest about the panel size that supports it. The economic logic of the model breaks the moment a physician's panel exceeds the point at which the access promise can be honoured. A doctor with two thousand patients on a concierge fee is collecting concierge money for primary-care service. The patient receives no actual upgrade. The fee, in that arrangement, is not a price — it is a tax on optimism.
Our caps at Kinedic are deliberately small. They are reviewed before any expansion. They are the reason the fee is structured the way it is, and the reason we decline applications when a particular physician's panel is full rather than over-promising and degrading the experience of existing members. If a practice will not tell you the size of the panel the named physician is carrying, that is information worth pausing on.
Who concierge medicine is not for
There is a category of senior Nigerian who reads this piece and concludes, sensibly, that the fee is not the right use of their money. That conclusion is sometimes correct.
If your medical needs are episodic and uncomplicated, if you live mostly outside Nigeria and visit only briefly, if your existing arrangements through an employer or a long-standing family doctor are working well, or if you are uninterested in continuous care because you prefer to be left alone between annual physicals — concierge medicine will not produce a return on the fee for you. The model is built for the household that wants continuity, that has chronic conditions or family history that justify ongoing management, that values legible reporting either for itself or for an absent payer, and that prefers to keep its medical safety net in the same country as its principal residence.
The serious practices are happy to say no when the fit is wrong. The first conversation should end in a decision either way, and a fair number of those decisions, honestly, should be no.
Closing
The Nigerian healthcare conversation has been allergic to clear pricing for as long as anyone reading this piece has been a patient. The allergy is no longer useful. The market that concierge medicine is now built for — diaspora children, senior households, principals, family offices — runs on legible numbers in every other part of its life. Healthcare is the last category where the question what does it cost is met with a pause.
We do not think it should be. The fee is what it is. The structure is what it is. The exclusions are what they are. None of that diminishes the relationship; if anything, it is what allows the relationship to be a real one rather than an unspoken negotiation.
If you are weighing the model and want a written quote for your specific situation — your age, your conditions, your household configuration, whether you are paying for yourself or for a parent — that quote is available on request before any clinical assessment. The first conversation costs nothing. The second one is honest about the fee.